hoakley Macs, Technology

Q&A: Why are my logs filling with these messages?

Q I happened to open Console the other day, when I had few apps open and nothing busy. To my shock, the logs were filling with frequent messages reporting that some processes were crashing repeatedly. Should I do anything about this?

Console messages like these indicate an old extension which keeps trying to start up. Update or remove it soonest.
Console messages like these indicate an old extension which keeps trying to start up. Update or remove it soonest.

A The type of message that you are seeing reads something like
com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.xrite.colormunkid): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

This indicates that a process in the LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons folder in one of your library folders – most probably /Library – is trying to start up, but keeps quitting or crashing. Because it has registered with OS X that it needs to keep running, the system tries to run it again after 10 seconds, and so it will go on.

The best thing to do is to identify which process it is, thus which third-party vendor supplied it, and visit their support site to download the latest version of the software. Once you have installed that, and have restarted your Mac, the messages should desist. If that is not possible or does not work, you will need to uninstall the product until this issue is sorted. Locate the original installer and you should find details of how to remove it.

If the worst comes to the worst, you can just remove the offending item from the LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons folder, and restart. However that will still leave other components in place, and could cause residual issues.

Comments Processes like this are identified using the reverse of their home server address. In this case, com.xrite.colormunkid would be read as colormunkid.xrite.com, which reveals that the software is that supporting an Xrite ColorMunki colorimeter system.

These commonly install XML files in either of the two folders LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons, which are then used to determine when their driver and other support software is run via the launchd mechanism. In this case its file there requires it to run at all times, as a background app. So launchd will endeavour to keep it running, here by restarting it every time it quits or crashes, which is what is meant by the word ‘respawn’. Unless you do something about this, it will continue to start, stop, and be restarted about 10 seconds later, until you shut your Mac down.

If you have not taken a peek inside your logs recently, you should do so now!